Will PlayStation or Xbox Be Getting Call of Duty Black Ops 4 DLC Exclusivity from Activision?

With all rumours and leaks, the official announcement has now been made by Activision. Call of Duty Black Ops 4 will be coming in 2018! The Call of Duty Black Ops 4 community reveal event will be taking place May 17th 2018, and for the first time ever, a COD title will be releasing in October. A huge question within the Call of Duty community, which comes up every year is: will PlayStation or Xbox be getting Call of Duty Black Ops 4 DLC Exclusivity from Activision?

Call of Duty Black Ops 4 DLC Exclusivity – PlayStation or Xbox

With the Black Ops 4 teaser just dropped, everyone is getting very excited for the next Treyarch game. There is however something I want to focus on that affects everyone who will get the game. Which console provider will be getting Black Ops 4 DLC exclusivity?

The History

Every hardcore CoD gamer will know this but for those who don’t, let me fill you in.

For the last 3 years, and the same amount of CoD games, all the franchises DLC map packs have dropped 30 days early on PlayStation only. Xbox and PC get it 30 days later.

What relatively new players won’t know is that before the 3rd of September 2015, Microsoft had owned this deal for 5 years (although that exclusivity was less DLC and more that the entire game was given to Xbox early).

The 3rd of September was the date that everything changed but the deal Sony and Activision signed was finalised way before, in May, and announced at E3 that year.

At E3, the Sony Computer Entertainment boss Andrew House publicly announced that PlayStation was “the new home of Call of Duty”. Now that you’re up to speed, we can talk about what’s next.

When does the current Call of Duty DLC Exclusivity deal run out?

The current deal is thought to run out sometime in 2018 as it’s unlikely that PlayStation would have been able to buy exclusive rights to two Treyarch games in one go, especially one that they hadn’t even started to develop yet.

This would also make sense because Activision would probably want to drive up the price of the exclusivity deal for the next Treyarch game and voiding the deal after 3 years would allow that to happen.

Who’s getting it next?

Unfortunately, at this stage there are no concrete leaks or rock-solid intel. However there have been a few suggestions in some places that could give us a clue. Don’t forget we don’t even know when the bidding or negotiations start. They could have already happened (although that’s very unlikely).

Activision’s full press release tells us a little bit about what we can expect from Black Ops 4. If you look at it, at the bottom you will notice that credits for “PlayStation” and “PS4” have been included alongside Activision.

This could mean that PlayStation will be receiving Black Ops 4 exclusivity or it could just be Activision stating that PlayStation is the current holder of the exclusivity deal. The second idea seems less likely though.

Another interesting thing to note is that a Treyarch developer by the name of David Vonderhaar recently changed his Twitter profile picture to an Xbox avatar and changed it back again very quickly. This could be a genuine tease or it could be the studio trying to mess with everybody’s heads. The Xbox One X is the most powerful console right now so it would make sense for exclusivity over the next 3 years. An important note is, whoever gets it is likely to have it until 2021. Either way it’s interesting to know and consider.

At the moment it is impossible for us to know for sure whether Sony or Microsoft will be getting this all-important deal. However, we will get more and more leaks as time goes on and we will make sure to bring them to you.